


Take It All

by Paperclippe



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age - Various Authors, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Amputation, Blood, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, DLC, Dark, Drabble, Dragon Age: Inquisition Spoilers, Eluvians, Exalted Council, F/M, Gap Filler, Halamshiral, I'm Sorry, Loss, Loss of Limbs, Love, Marriage, Non-Canonical, One Shot, One True Pairing, Orlais, Pain, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition, Quickies, Romance, Sad, Short, Short One Shot, Solas is Fen'Harel, Spoilers, Swearing, The Anchor (Dragon Age), The Winter Palace (Dragon Age), Trespasser - Freeform, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 13:25:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6117799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paperclippe/pseuds/Paperclippe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She couldn’t know if that small stone had evil fingers, if it traveled through her veins and deep into her core. How much could she stand to lose? </p><p>How much could she stand to keep?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take It All

Evelyn stumbled out of the eluvian. Her companions had passed through some moments earlier and had waited anxiously at the foot of the mirror for the Inquisitor, who they could have sworn had been right behind them. But now she came - or more, fell - through the mirror, her knees cracking loudly off of the palace’s marble floor. It was a sharp, stomach-turning sound, but she made no sound of pain, no protest. She only clutched her left wrist with her right hand until the knuckles were white and stared dazedly into some unseen middle distance.

From the side of the mirror, Cassandra stepped forward and reached out her arms to Evelyn, kneeling swiftly and carefully, and she asked breathlessly, “Inquisitor, what -” but the look on Evelyn’s face as her vision focused on the Seeker’s chocolate brown eyes cut Cassandra off completely.

“Cassan…” but her brain shifted thoughts fuzzily, suddenly. “Solas…” was all the Inquisitor managed before a green fire lit up on her left palm and Evelyn began to scream, a sound that ripped up from her gut and into the still air of the palace’s small side room. She bent forward, pressing the crown of her head to the cool stone floor and shrieked wordlessly into the marble, her eyes squeezed shut.

Cassandra whipped around and shouted at Varric, at Dorian, at anyone, “Get the commander!”

Both men rushed for the door but were stopped halfway by Cullen rushing in from the courtyard, summoned by the sound of Evelyn’s screams.

“What’s happened?” he asked, but pushed without answer past dwarf and mage and Seeker and to the side of the Inquisitor, his wife, his new bride. He bent his knees to reach for her. Evelyn quieted, sucking in desperate lungfuls of air at the sound of Cullen’s voice. Weakly, she sat up.

“We don’t know, Commander,” Cassandra offered, palms open to the ceiling, to the sky in confusion, frustration, prayer.

Knelt beside Evelyn, Cullen shot back, “What do you mean, you don’t know? Weren’t you there with her?”

“We got back first somehow -” offered Varric.

“The Anchor: it’s getting worse,” Dorian stuttered.

“Do you think I can’t see that!” Cullen snapped. “Ev -”

“Cut it off,” she hissed between her teeth.

“Evelyn,” Cullen tried to soothe her. “I’ll get you help, we’ll -”

“Cut the fucking thing off!” she screamed, thrusting her flickering, sizzling hand at him, nearly knocking the commander off of his feet with the violence of her own agony. She took several gasping breaths and the glow from her hand subsided slightly. “I’m going to kill that elf,” she whispered.

“Solas? He was there?” Cullen asked, taking her right hand in both of his.

Between pants of air, sweat beginning to bead on her pale face, Evelyn said, “Cullen, I love you and I promise I will tell you everything just as soon as you remove this thing from my arm.” The fingers on her left hand were curling in toward her palm, toward the Anchor, like the limbs of a dying insect. “Please,” she added calmly, too calmly.

“Me?” said Cullen. “I don’t - I can’t - Cassandra -” he turned with a panicked expression on his broad, open face, his grip tightening on the Inquisitor’s unaffected hand.

“Commander - Cullen, she is your -”

“Look, I don’t care who the fuck does it. Give me a sword, I’ll do it myself,” her words came out in a forceful, rapid-fire stream as the pain returned in a sharp wave, the Anchor crackling and hissing under her skin like oil left too long over an open flame. She would have already done it with her spirit blade but she didn’t have the energy or the concentration to summon the ethereal weapon, and she wouldn’t be used to holding it, wouldn’t be accurate with it in her right hand anyway. She might never use the blade it the same way again. But that was something she could figure out later. Not having a hand for both a staff and a sword was a problem only if she survived the damage that the Anchor was doing to begin with, only if she remained strong enough to ever wield any weapon again, and with the twisting tentacles of pain she felt crawling up her arm now, up her arm and into her brain, she was less sure of her own survival with every wasted second. She felt her body slumping back toward the floor.

Cullen reached out and pulled Evelyn against him, holding her tightly as he stood, drawing her up from the floor and helping her stand on her trembling legs.

“Alright,” he conceded. “Someone get a chair for her. Cassandra, give me your sword.”

And just like that, he was the commander again.

The tall woman nodded her braided head and slid her blade from its scabbard, the steel making a bright, ringing sound. Flipping it over in a skilled hand, she presented it to Cullen hilt first. 

From across the room, Dorian dragged a straight-backed wooden chair, and he and Varric helped Evelyn fall into it as Cullen took Cassandra’s sword and wiped the blade along the red fabric of his finery, as though the cleanliness of the metal would matter, as though Evelyn weren’t already going to have to tend to the wound that the man she loved was about to inflict upon her.

She slid back into the chair with a groan. Dorian patted her stiffly on the arm.

As Cullen was pulling off his goldenrod yellow gloves, Varric leaned in close to Evelyn, saying gruffly, “Look, I, ah, I’m sorry about all… of this, Inquisitor.”

“Don’t be. Not your fault, Varric,” she breathed, eyes closed, cheeks wan. She laid her arms along the chair’s armrests, and the Anchor snapped threateningly. Evelyn swallowed hard as she felt Cullen’s warm hands roll up her sleeve.

“How far should I…” he asked quietly.

For a moment Evelyn quietly appraised her body, her pain. The Anchor was confined to her palm. She could feel it there, a hard stone caught under her thin skin. She could perhaps dig it out if she wanted badly enough to keep her hand. But she couldn’t know if that small stone had evil fingers, if it travelled through her veins and deep into her core. She certainly couldn’t cut it all away if that were the case, but how much could she stand to lose? 

How much could she stand to keep?

A crackle of energy ripped from her fingertips to her toes and sent a spasm through her whole self.

“All of it,” she choked. “Take it all.”

Cullen wrapped his left hand tentatively around her wrist and she nearly nodded, but the tightness in the muscles of her forearm changed her mind. Quickly, Evelyn shook her head and opened her eyes, reaching across her body with her right hand, tapping the inside of her left elbow.

Cullen squeezed her wrist where he held her. His dark eyes fixed on her green-grey ones. “Ev.”

Now she nodded, letting her eyelids lower once more as she laid her head back against the chair. “I’m sorry, Cullen,” she said as he obeyed, lifting the sword. “I know you didn’t plan on having a one-armed wife.”

He let himself smile, though she could not see. “It’s alright. You’ll just wear the ring on the other hand.” He steadied the blade in the crook of her arm. “I love you,” he said quietly.

“You’d better,” she answered.

“Now, just a second,” she heard Dorian say as the edge of the sword pressed gently against her flesh.

“Wife? Ring?” came Varric’s voice as Cullen drew a long slice of the sharp metal through the meat of Evelyn’s limb, his strong arms sure with the blade, cutting easily into the softness of the joint. She thought there should have been pain as she heard the first drops of her own blood smack against the stone floor, but she only felt a warm, wet, blessed relief.

“Shh,” Cassandra hushed them, and as though the Seeker’s breath could summon silence, Evelyn’s world went quiet, went black.

**Author's Note:**

> Ever since I first played Trespasser, I always wondered about this moment. One minute, you see Evelyn (er, your Inquisitor) stuck on the other side of the eluvian, and the next, she's charging back into the Exalted Council with her sleeve rolled up like a badass. 
> 
> So I figured, what the heck.


End file.
